Representing Animals in Early Modern English Heraldry Kathryn Will [email protected]
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Early Modern Culture Volume 11 Article 6 7-1-2016 When is a Panther not a Panther? Representing Animals in Early Modern English Heraldry Kathryn Will [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/emc Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons Recommended Citation Will, Kathryn (2016) "When is a Panther not a Panther? Representing Animals in Early Modern English Heraldry," Early Modern Culture: Vol. 11 , Article 6. Available at: https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/emc/vol11/iss1/6 This Seminar Essay is brought to you for free and open access by TigerPrints. It has been accepted for inclusion in Early Modern Culture by an authorized editor of TigerPrints. For more information, please contact [email protected]. When is a Panther Not a Panther? Representing Animals in Early Modern English Heraldry KATHRYN WILL he Blazon of Gentrie, a 1586 book on heraldry written by John Ferne, uses a fictional dialogue between a herald and a knight to discuss “discourses of armes and of gentry,” including “the bearing, and blazon of cote- T armors.”1 Midway through the book, Paradinus, the herald, describes an earlier writer’s take on the meanings of certain animals that may appear on coats of arms. According to “the fragments of Iacobus Capellanus,” he observes, “the Cuckow is for ingratitude, and the Doue for thankefulnesse,” lions signify “courage, furie and rage,” and “the flye is taken for a shamelesse or impudent person.” After listing over a dozen of these symbolic creatures, however, Paradinus cautions the knight to take his catalogue with a grain of salt: I would not wish Gentlemen too curious in the signes of their coate- armors, for if any man should communicate in his life or conuersation, but halfe the partes or quallities of that beast which he beareth in his coate of Armes, on my credit, it were more fit for him to be stabled amongst brute beasts, then chambred with the noble, albeit he bare euen the most worthie beast of all the rest.2 Ferne’s sly presentation suggests that for many readers, heraldic animals were potent sites of signification. As Erica Fudge has observed, even when early modern writers characterized animals as “the antithesis of the human,” their rhetoric tended to blur boundaries between species rather than clarify them.3 Indeed, Ferne’s double-edged rhetoric—particularly his joke that no gentleman would want to resemble even the noblest heraldic beast—encourages his audience to consider whether creatures on coats of arms really do reflect their owners’ past behavior or present habits. By denying meaning in heraldic animals one moment and providing it the next, books like Ferne’s essentially created their own market. Animals on armory were qualitatively different than lines, bars, geometric shapes, and objects like wheat sheaves and farm tools. Non-human creatures had accreted centuries’ worth of human observation and narrative: along with acting as laborers, food and medicine, and day-to-day companions, they were also objects of scientific observation and pro- and antagonists in classical, Biblical, and medieval fables. As a result, any given animal image could Early Modern Culture 11 (2016): 78-98 ©Clemson University When is a Panther Not a Panther? provoke various and conflicting interpretations and associations. Moreover, heraldic beasts possessed an avatarial quality that inanimate objects on shields lacked. Noble arms bearers’ badges had long been linked with animal symbols through historiographical and prophetic tradition; Richard III’s white boar appeared in visual and textual narratives for centuries after his death, and Elizabeth famously used a phoenix as her badge.4 Heraldic badges and seals featuring animals also appeared in populist contexts. Along with the beasts on London livery companies’ coats of arms, mayors and aldermen took up personal devices, often featuring plants and animals, which they displayed on seals and during London civic processions.5 By the late sixteenth century, heralds at the College of Arms were belatedly exerting more stringent control over the proper use of such bearings. At the same time, popular printed texts circulated images and explanations of heraldry to gentlemen and strivers. As a result, beasts on coats of arms took on new uses and significations from those they had held in earlier centuries. In what follows, I explore how groups with stakes in heraldic distinction used animals’ multiplicitous meanings to redefine legitimate heraldry. To contest heraldry’s social and material diffusion, a gentleman was increasingly defined by his ability to call a panther a panther or distinguish a good lion from a bad one. In this milieu, beasts on early modern arms weren’t mere ciphers representing their bearers’ gentility. Rather, every coat of arms’ legitimacy depended partly upon how, and by whom, its animal components had been rendered. Historicizing Heraldic Animals During the early Crusades, knights used collective and personalized imagery on garments worn over their armor to identify themselves in battle and at tournaments.6 These garments were the original coats of arms; only later was the name extended to the shield that bore a knight’s design. In these early days, some knights obtained armorial distinction from their lords, while others assumed it of their own accord. Sometime during the twelfth century, these armorial designs were transformed into a genealogical system among royalty and gentry across Europe. In England, coats were generally passed down through a patrilineal system.7 Only the head of the household could bear the original coat design, while spouses, children, and siblings used versions of the same device that featured graphical alterations called differences.8 Because heraldry is often discussed as purely representational, it’s important to note that animals participated in its material development, albeit posthumously. Many of heraldry’s geometric patterns, including thick bands and chevrons, originated in materials that soldiers added to make their armor more effective. Leather strips—i.e., animal skins—helped strengthen shields and could be painted with tinctures made from organic compounds like fish glue.9 Other animals provided visual embellishment via their hides. An entire class of heraldic decorations is known as furs: the delicate ermine pattern is an allusion to the 79 Early Modern Culture spotted coat of the ermine or stoat, while vair—alternating rows of blue and white bell-shaped figures—represents the sewn-together hides of a squirrel that was “blueish-grey on the back and white underneath” (Figure 1). As Susan Crane notes, these and other heraldic terms link graphical heraldry “with furred, trimmed garments.”10 By retaining visual and linguistic references to real animals, this stylized visual system constantly acknowledges its visceral origins. Figure 1. Illustrations of shields featuring the furs ermine and vair (“verry”). William Segar (?), Armorial of English Families (ca. 1590). Folger MS V.b.74, 202v. Personal photograph of manuscript at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Graphic patterns on early coats of arms were thus animal-made objects in the dual sense Fudge describes in “Renaissance Animal Things”: both animal- made objects constructed from dead creatures, and animals made-object— objectified beasts who retained a degree of agency by protecting comparatively fragile human bodies.11 An animal depicted as a design, or charge, on a coat of 80 When is a Panther Not a Panther? arms added another representational dimension: we might call such a device an “animal”-made object, with scare quotes signifying the beast’s aesthetic role. The earliest charges of this sort included creatures like lions, eagles, and dragons. These exotic and fantastical creatures were always depicted according to specific generic conventions: they had stylized features, like raised tails and open jaws or beaks, and held poses later formalized in heraldic terminology as attitudes. Lions were shown rampant (rearing up) or passant (walking), while eagles were displayed (wings outspread). While the original sources for these particular animals and poses remain unclear, some scholars speculate that crusaders encountered them in Middle Eastern textiles. When knights from England and other countries returned to Europe from the Crusades, they may have imported images of non- native and fabulous creatures on their shields.12 Knights initially assumed their own heraldry when they served their lord or king in battle. Over the course of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, however, landowners increasingly paid the king to hire soldiers without going to war themselves. In England, the fact that a person bore a coat of arms no longer guaranteed that they or their ancestors had borne arms on behalf of the sovereign.13 Along with heraldry’s reduced martial connections, thanks to economic and social shifts, more members of the lower gentry had the requisite income (about 40£ per year) to essentially purchase knighthood, and thus gained heraldic devices to pass down to their descendants.14 According to anthropologist Dave Davis, “lineage emblems represent the use of material culture to reconcile (1) systems of social ranking and economic privilege that are formally grounded in principles of inheritance with (2) the de facto upward mobility of some individuals into the lower ranks of the elite.”15 This schema accurately describes heraldic arms’ diffusion down the social ladder in England. Historian Maurice Keen observes that “heraldry…came in time to be emblematic of the pride of birth, station and culture of the nobility in its broadest range,” while Crane writes that by the time of the Hundred Years War, “not only knights but undubbed gentles and esquires were choosing coats of arms, without any presumption that they would become knights or even landholders.”16 The period thus saw a “proliferation of prosthetic ‘stand-ins’” for desirable qualities that ranged from respectable lineage to contemporary social status.17 As arms proliferated, people required more and different shield images to distinguish themselves from their neighbors.